Standing in the Divide

I was ten when I first witnessed real hatred. I was standing at the front of Nestor Elementary, my Transformers lunchbox clutched against my chest. I watched three white men beat a Black boy until his blood stained the concrete. The teachers rushed us inside, but they couldn’t protect us from the sound, the dull thud of fists, the racial slurs that cut through the air, and the proud laughter that followed. That laughter haunts me more than the violence itself. How could anyone find joy in causing such pain?

Today, I find myself back on those school steps. My hands still shake, my throat still tightens, but now I understand something I couldn’t grasp at ten: violence doesn’t always throw punches. Sometimes it wears suits and signs papers. Sometimes, it speaks in coded language about “preserving values” while tearing families apart.

The political divide cutting through our country isn’t just about different opinions; it’s about the weight of unhealed wounds, both personal and collective. I carry my own: the silence I learned during the AIDS crisis when my mother’s well-intentioned but misguided attempt to protect me taught me shame instead. “We don’t talk about those people,” she’d say, flipping past news reports of gaunt faces and protest signs. Or when I mentioned a friend of mine of color, “We don’t see color – everyone’s the same.”

But I did see color. I saw it in my classmate’s blood on the concrete. I saw it in the fear that lived in the eyes of my Black friends after that day. And I felt the crushing weight of being one of “those people” my mother wanted to pretend didn’t exist. Her colorblind rhetoric and careful erasure of LGBTQ+ lives didn’t protect me, it buried parts of me so deep I spent years excavating my own truth.

These memories surface now with renewed urgency as I watch history threatening to repeat itself. Each new policy that targets the vulnerable, each speech that demonizes difference, each attempt to legislate away human dignity, they all echo with that same proud laughter I heard on the school steps decades ago.

But here’s what I’ve learned since that day: silence isn’t safety, it’s surrender. The “colorblind” approach my mother taught me didn’t eliminate racism; it just made it harder to name and confront. Pretending certain people don’t exist doesn’t erase their humanity, it just compounds pain.

I think about that boy often. I wonder how much weight he carries from that day. I wonder if he knows that his story became part of mine, teaching me that remaining silent in the face of injustice makes us complicit. Most of all, I wonder if he knows that his experience helped shape my understanding of what it means to truly stand with and for each other.

As I watch our nation’s divide deepen, I feel the familiar tightness in my chest, the same fear I felt at ten. But now I know what to do with that fear. I know that change begins with telling the truth: about our past, about our pain, about our power to choose a different way forward.

We can’t heal what we won’t acknowledge. We can’t build bridges if we pretend the chasms don’t exist. But we can choose, every day, to lead with love: not the passive, comfortable kind that looks away from pain, but the fierce, active love that stands up and speaks out, that reaches across divides while holding firm to our principles.

I am more than the sum of my wounds. We all are. We must remember that the path forward isn’t about forgetting our differences or pretending our scars don’t exist. It’s about creating space for both our pain and possibility. We must hold on to a collective vision and support each other to realize it.

In the end, this isn’t just about politics. It’s about what kind of people we choose to be. That choice faces us anew each day, asking us to remember that behind every policy, every executive order, every debate are real human lives, real stories, real pain – and real possibilities for transformation.

I choose to remember. I choose to speak. I choose to hope. And I choose to believe that love, in action and in truth, can still light the way forward.

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